Peridot Green I

Symbolic Symbiotic

Fall 2019

The working title for this show was Non-Linguistic Communication. We settled on a less direct expression of the same idea. Linguists tend to define language as something exclusively human and we want to question that by finding moments where language doesn’t behave like itself. Besides scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictographs, there are books like Finnegans Wake. The Japanese title of the surrealist video game Katamari Damacy (塊魂 lit. “clump soul”) is a visual rhyme. Our title is something like that, a pleasant mouthful that refers obliquely to our objective. “Symbolic” is an adjective describing a relationship between two concepts, where one stands in for the other. “Symbiotic” is an adjective describing a relationship between two entities, where each depends upon and benefits the other.

Wingdings AC - a New Font

Elizabeth A. Watkins and Laura B. Greig

In celebration of our first official salon, the artists designed a new version of the iconic Wingdings font, incorporating symbols from American Cyborg’s lexicon, and painted them in the Walled Garden. 0-9 are represented by knots.

Thoughts & Prayers

Lauren Hlubny & Thomas Giles

Through Groupmuse, we invited a group of artists to perform excerpts from their show.

Thoughts & Prayers explores America’s relationship with tragedy, catastrophe, and loss. Over the course of an hour, the work presents Dana and Felix, a fictitious couple, and their experience of Five Disasters through dramatic mixtures of music, movement, and images—a dance-theatre concerto. Six musicians (3 woodwinds, 3 strings) embody two distinct Greek Choruses: Congress and The Activists, giving full voice to the acrimonious clashes of present-day America. Each Act, or Disaster, is introduced through a virtuosic cadenza and dance solo, and followed by orchestrated structures of dialogue, physical partnering, and contrary staging. This collaboration between artists of completely different disciplines creates a complicated, disruptive, elegant, and dark world made cohesive by director Lauren Hlubny and her team of dedicated professionals.

Photos from our Gathering

THE HEX

On March 26th, 2019, Bryan M. Wilson and Midge Wattles reset our space. They took down all the old artwork and cleaned up the black paint on the walls. Instead of patching and erasing the history of hanging hardware, they added a gem to the head of each nail and screw, proportional to its size. It left us a constellation of four years of hanging history.

In the garden, Bryan performed a ritualistic planting of the seeds of value:

FLAMINGO - gold, south right corner

CONDOR - silver, south left corner

OWL - bronze, north left corner

FINCH - lapis lazuli, north right corner

STARLING - peridot, under the center tree

Value is identified, then the bird was asked to visualize that value as a form in their mind.

Form is imagined and then I, CARDINAL, would flip a Morgan silver dollar, letting that value form give life by Lady Fate.

The bird was then asked to remember if the coin flip read heads/tails.

Once Lady Fate gave her judgement on the value form, the form is released into the world.